(Commit Partnership) – In 2018, the Dallas Independent School District began charting a course toward restorative justice on all its campuses. Now, six years and several earthshaking events later, the data strongly suggest this was the right course for students.

Throughout my career as an educator, administrator, school board member and now nonprofit leader, my work has been driven by data. Numbers show much more than just academic achievement; they often reveal deep disparities and shortcomings of education policies.

During the 2013-2014 school year, more than 36,500 Texas students in kindergarten through second grade received out-of-school suspensions. More than 2,500 out-of-school suspensions went to pre-K students.

These practices disproportionately affected Black students. During that same school year, Black students accounted for 42% of all pre-K through fifth grade out-of-school suspensions, despite making up only 13% of the elementary school population in Texas. Loss of instructional time leads to gaps in student outcomes that only grow as patterns repeat through the years, leading to disparities in workforce success and ultimately incarceration rates.

This school-to-prison pipeline is not only unjust, it is unsustainable. More than 38% of the U.S. incarcerated population is Black, a rate almost three times their share of the population, at 13.4%. Seven of the top 30 Texas zip codes inmates last called home are in Dallas ISD. Incarcerating so many of our community members comes with a huge cost to our state, and incarceration severely limits economic opportunity for the families left behind. Something had to change.

In 2018, a coalition of local advocates led by parents of color brought this data to the attention of the Dallas ISD school board, doing me and the other trustees a service. In response, I worked with these community members to draft a new discipline policy that, once passed, made Dallas ISD the first large urban district to waive suspensions for students in pre-K to second grade. This ban on out-of-school suspensions for the district’s youngest children is now Texas state law.

Then, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, access to equitable instructional time became an even larger issue as remote learning disrupted the educational experience of an entire generation. But technology made necessary by the pandemic also presented an opportunity. Dallas ISD’s superintendent at the time, Michael Hinojosa recognized if students could attend class anywhere, and in many cases at any time, then why would we ever suspend a student again?

In 2021, Dallas ISD ended out-of-school and in-school suspensions at all grade levels. The Dallas ISD Board of Trustees approved $4 million to fund reset centers on all 52 comprehensive middle- and high-school campuses in the district. For students who are removed from regular classrooms, reset centers offer space to continue their schoolwork and receive help building the social and emotional skills to manage their own behavior.

Now, we have data showing the positive impact of rethinking how we approach misbehavior.  Since waiving suspensions and implementing reset centers in 2019, the number of in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions and even placements in the reset centers that replaced suspensions fell 80% for all grades. Reset centers are redefining discipline and putting restorative justice into practice. There is still a long way to go, but the data already reflects compelling behavioral change.

We took a risk in 2018 to fundamentally change the approach to misbehavior. Now, we have identified the tools necessary to support this work as we engage with more districts seeking to reform their policies. We have gained the data and experience to confidently help them find the right combination of strategic staffing, training for educators, funding for reset center facilities and learning resources they need to realize restorative justice on their campuses.

It is exciting to see such improvement. But more importantly, the numbers are meaningful because they represent students who are now closer to achieving economic mobility. Removing suspensions and other inequitable barriers is as essential as providing the equal opportunity for growth and achievement that every single student deserves.

Miguel Solis, former member of the Dallas Independent School District Board of Trustees, is the president of The Commit Partnership. He can be reached at https://www.commitpartnership.org.